The Dare
There’s nothing that happens in Giles Alderson’s The Dare that is particularly scary or original. It’s a pretty by-the-numbers horror film of the now somewhat dated torture porn variety, wherein a group of strangers are kidnapped, kept inside a masked psychopath’s cellar and regularly abused in increasingly violent ways.
The ostensible protagonist is Jay (Bart Edwards), whose consistent and blatant ignorance towards his captor’s few rules leads to nothing remotely positive for the entirety of the runtime. Trapped with him are short-tempered security guard Adam (Richard Short), personality-free and psychopath’s favorite victim Kat (Alexandra Evans) and long-term captive (Daniel Schultzmann) whose sewn up mouth renders him mute. Kat named him Paul after her cat, which brings up a LOT of follow-up questions – all of which The Dare declines to answer. Occasionally, their captor comes down and cuts off pieces of everyone with nary a word spoken. By minute five, viewers will have correctly sussed out how the next hour and a half will play out. At least, what happens underground.
In the main house, an entirely different film is taking place. One involving an older man (Richard Brake) and a child (Mitchell Norman, Harry Jarvis and Robert Maaser) that he kidnapped. Everything that occurs between them is just unending child abuse but, again, not frightening. Just brutal and sad.
These two stories do intertwine, eventually, in a sequence that takes at least a quarter of the movie to fully explain. It’s also what gives the plot more holes than Swiss cheese. Without a doubt, there is no possible way that the events of this movie could have happened the way screenwriters Alderson and Jonny Grant explain them to have occurred. Any attempt to logic out The Dare will leave viewers in more pain than anything these torture victims go through. But really, who was expecting a coherent storyline from a movie featuring its characters being regularly hosed down with pigs’ blood?
What it does excel at is being stomach-churning, at least for the average horror viewer. It’s not something that those raised on the Hostel or Saw franchises will find particularly innovative, but it has a healthy dose of gore and those looking for that will be satiated. It is so happy to give you that squeamish feeling that there are moments where The Dare feels like it’s going through a checklist of common phobias: Spider Bites? Check. Eyeball Gouging? Check. Semi-religious stigmata sequence? Strangely, check. The list continues, but audiences’ interest probably will not.
A viewer’s ability to handle or enjoy The Dare will vary from person-to-person and mainly depend on how much they enjoy grisly torture scenes that trade exclusively in gross-out moments. It may be a minuscule target audience, but those that this experience is intended for will probably enjoy all the brutal scenes. Just don’t go in expecting to be wowed by the story.
